My wife has been considering upgrading to an iPhone, but we’ve been debating which service plan we ought to get — I may have just been influenced by a bit of advertising.
It isn’t just that the “sorry, it’s a boy” comment has given MRAs everywhere the vapors and caused them to collapse into a misandrical swoon, but the wifi calling is a really attractive option — I’m considering it, too. At my workplace, I have really good wifi, but the cell phone signal is atrocious; my phone basically does not work at all in my office (this might be a feature, rather than a bug…).
The cell service in my building is pretty spotty. So I switched from Verizon to T-mobile mostly for the Wi-Fi calling. It’s a huge improvement.
Chelsea Handler, Sarah Silverman, a possum, and MRAs are throwing a temper tantrum about it? It’s the greatest TV commercial of all time!
Loved the ‘rabbit’.
Unfortunately Sarah Silverman’s T-Mobile commercial might be cancelled out by this one…
I absolutely loved “sorry it’s a boy”. That was single-handedly the funniest line in a commercial the entire Superbowl evening.
Trophy room.
If the MRAs don’t have the sense to stop their kvetching and end up turning this into an Internet scandal, can we call it Whinergate?
The wi fi calling can be mimicked with an ap on nearly any smartphone.
I’ve got Talkatone on my Iphone 6 and it works just fine.
T-mobile service can be pretty spotty if you don’t live in a highly serviced urban area. The wi-fi calling is a must to partially make up for that. I just switched away from t-mobile after about 3 years and have been surprised how much better the coverage with AT&T and Verizon are here.
TMobile offers a variant of the Asus RT68 WiFi router under the name Personal WiFi Cellspot. The variation is, it prioritizes voice packets. The bandwidth used by voice is negligible (roughly twenty-two Kb, where your broadband speed is likely measured in Mb), so prioritizing the packets keeps calls smooth without noticeable impact on video / software updates / hangouts. TMobile lends the subscriber a CellSpot WiFi unit, and the subscriber lends TMobile $25. If the subscriber cancels his TMobile contract, the subscriber returns the CellSpot WiFi and TMobile returns the $25. If the subscriber does not return the CellSpot WiFi unit, then TMobile keeps the $25 and bills the subscriber for the cost of the unit.
TMobile also has Test Drive, which lets you try out a TMobile iPhone 5S for seven days wherever you’re likely to be using it so you can confirm that their LTE network coverage meets your needs.
I have T-Mobile with an iPhone 6+, since work moved me to a basement location (I shower, honest) my reception went to hell and I switch to T-Mobile wi-fi when at work. Same at my sister’s rural house, t-motible drop to 1x speed (below even 2G) and flipping to the wi-fi for phone calls works fine.
I switch manually to wifi calling and back. Technically you don’t have to switch manually, but if you want to use the new Continuity feature that lets you answer iphone calls from the iPad then you have to turn off wi-fi calling. I so put it in normal mode at home and wi-fi when the signal drops too low and there is wi-fi available.
Your campus network can block wi-fi calling from working so it might be best to ask or test.
I pretty much hated the commercials this year (if it were up to me, I’d skip them completely), but now that I’ve heard how much wailing they’ve caused the MRA’s, I think they had a banner year.
I’ve got T-Mobile, but I only have an iPhone 5.
Oh, appearantly Creationists in clouding Ken Ham blew their stack over the Carnival Cruise Line ad.
Edit: …including…
ugh, I’m strongly doubting whether I want to continue living in this world right now.
FIFY ;)
Yeah, because we live in a world where some people don’t gratulate you for the birth of your second daughter* but try to console you.
*for a given value of “daughter”.
Jesus, talk about hypersensitive and dramatic. I can’t count the number of times i’ve heard both in real life and in movies, series, books, etc, the line “sorry, it’s a girl” line and its many variations. Someone does it ONCE with an obvious comedic and subersive effect and raaaaaaarrrrrggggghhhhhh missandryyyyy!!!11!!!1110!!!!!1
Can’t i go one day without feeling embarrashed for being a weakling male?
The commercial came across to me as though she was saying, “Sorry [for being on the phone in the delivery room, oh, by the way], it’s a boy”. I honestly don’t understand what all the fuss is about..
Hoosier X @7:
I vote #Superbawl.
Republic Wireless has cheap plans with Wi-Fi calls, text and data. They use the Sprint cell network when not on Wi-Fi. The main catch is that you have to buy the phone up front (Moto x, g, or e) and there is no insurance on the phone, but for unlimited call and text and then unlimited call, text and data on Wi-Fi for $10 a month (other plans have data without Wi-Fi), I switched from AT&T where I was paying $45+ for just unlimited call and text.
I don’t work for the company (just thought people would be interested) and I’ve only been with them for a few months (my significant other has been with them for about a year) so I have limited experience. But for those who want a smart phone and have a tight budget, you may want to check them out.
woozy @ 16 Don’t let it get you down. Dumbasses are gonna dumbass.
Stay with us, we need all the help we can get. :)
Oh, dear. I’m afraid you completely missed the point. I think it’s pretty clear that Silverman’s character is actually expressing (detached) regret at the child being male and it is meant to be a joke (and a damned funny one at that). The two characters, Silverman and Handler, are playing self-absorbed and out of touch caricatures of themselves constantly one-upping each other with bizarre and strange rooms. The rooms only exist for the purpose of one-upping each other and Silverman’s self-absorbed character would absolutely never be concerned or apologize for being on the phone during another person’s important life moment because her character would think they only exist (and they do) as a prop for her. The “sorry, it’s a boy” is funny because it’s utterly inappropriate and she’s projecting her (supposed) viewpoint on arbitrary people who will not share it, but it fits in with the perception of her comedy persona. It’s a joke on her more than anything else.
I thought it was one of the funniest things I’ve seen. I think Silverman is a brilliant comedian.
=====
Hmm, I had completely forgotten the “Sorry, it’s a girl” type lines. They always pissed me off but they were and still are rather frequent.
@21 I’ve been with Republic a couple years now, basically since they started (I think I was in wave E or F of the beta rollout) and I love it. The service is great and unlike talkatone or other third party apps it seamlessly transitions to the cell network when you leave wifi range. The best part is that it only costs me $28 for unlimited talk/text/3g data, which more than makes up for having to drop a few hundred bucks on the phone. Also the 1st gen Moto X is one of the best android handsets I’ve ever used (the OLED screen is utterly gorgeous), although mine has a cracked screen. Hmmmm… maybe its time for an upgrade to that shiny aluminum 2nd gen…
When I moved my parents out of the ancestral home to a condo nearer to me, one of the things my mother uncovered during the packing was a shoebox full of little cards. Apparently, it was the custom to send these (very small) cards to congratulate the mother on a successful birth. I was the second; the eldest is a brother.
Almost half of the cards had some variant of “Sorry you didn’t get the girl you wanted. Try again!” They even had a girl’s name picked out for me. (Before the days of ultrasound).
My mother just shrugged and laughed when I showed them to her. Of course, they were so sure the third was a girl that they couldn’t come up with a boy’s name until after they had sent him home from the hospital. “Baby” is what is listed on the original birth certificate.
woozy @ 16
One of the tweets featured in that article is from a person whose Twitter handle is John Galt saying they can’t take a cruise on a godless ship line. O___O
I also thought the “sorry” referred to Silverman being on the phone.
I don’t think it’s that clear.
I don’t know why you’d think she was apologizing for being rude when the entire premise of the ad is how vain they both are. And she’s taking a frivolous phone call in the middle of a birth. How does that even make sense?
By the way, PSA: most people in the world can have completely free wifi calling to US numbers with the Google Hangouts app (plus the Hangouts Dialer app on Android).
markmckee #8
On iOS, third-party apps VoIP is a bit of a pain for answering. Correct me if I’m wrong and something’s changed (I only got an iPad mini 2 and iPod Touch 4), but Apple doesn’t allow apps to have their own answering screen, so you only get a regular notification of the call, then have to swipe it, and then you have to input your PIN if the phone is locked (or admittedly just use Touch ID).
Also, Talkatone and Groove IP require you to have a second number. I don’t know if Talkatone still works with Google Voice, which would be the only way to have only one number, but most people don’t already have a GV number, so they’d have to switch.
T-mo’s Wifi calling is baked into the phone’s firmware, that’s why it can work on iPhones and why phones like the Nexus line don’t have it, cause they are carrier-clean. An update is coming from Google for the Nexus 6 soon that will enable it though.
@andyo 27
If you are at all familiar with Silverman it is completely obvious even without the over the top prop room competition.
Cause even though she’s outrageously out of line, her saying “sorry [I’m on the phone]” makes it funny?
I know Sarah Silverman thankyouverymuch and I do like her a lot. I think it was probably made ambiguous completely on purpose. I just don’t think it was that clear is what I’m saying. Also, she may not have even written the skit or even the line.
Seven of Mine:
That’s not inconsistent, provided you accept the divinity of Ayn Rand Herself (PBUH). That whole atheism thing was misdirection.
Hmmm…. I’m not sure I get it from that angle. Why would apologizing for being on the phone be funny? And why would her character apologize for being on the phone at all? The entire point is that this character isn’t attached at all to the couple having a child. They are literally only background to her.
Okay, fair enough. I didn’t mean to come across as “Well, duh, of course it’s the way I see it and if you missed it you’re an idiot” and I apologize if I did.
But I think this is a case of being too close to one’s first impression that it seems to make more sense to one than it actually does. Watch it again. Surely the “misandry” interpretation is funnier.
(Although, I just watched it a third time. The “sorry I’m on the phone” interpretation fits equally well with the delivery. [Dramatic delivery– not the birth delivery; ambiguity unintended.] But, in my opinion, isn’t as funny. But it’s not as unfunny as I thought it would be.
So okay, it’s not that clear.)
====
Kevin @25.
Well, your parents already had one gender so it’s understandable (but ill-advised) that’d they’d want the other.
For another rather strange attitude (another “sorry, it’s a girl” line) when my mother had her second child, her only son, the attending nurse congratulating for getting a boy “on her first try”. My mother’s interpretation was that the nurse thought boys were more desirable and harder to have than girls and that the second child is the “first try” because every-one just gives up and assumes it’s inevitable that the first child is just going to be a girl so they don’t even try. I’m thinking maybe the nurse assumed all mothers secretly want a girl so the don’t try for a boy in the first pregnancy and it’s only the second pregnancy (if the first is a girl) when they “try” for a boy to please their husbands. Or maybe the nurse assumed it was my mothers first child because it was her first child with a husband. Either way it was *really* a weird comment. And weird assumptions.
woozy @ # 16 provided a link in which John Kennedy is quoted as saying, “… it is an interesting biological fact that all of us have in our veins the exact same percentage of salt in our blood that exists in the ocean…, much to the high dudgeon of Ken Ham.
I had previously read a similar claim that human blood has the same salt level as that in the ocean at the estimated time our ancestors moved onto the land – quite a bit lower than that of the ocean today.
1) Is either claim true?
2) If so, why would such a proportion be conserved in a frequently salt-scarce environment such as terrestriality?
1) No. No even remotely. 2) see 1).
It’s kind of akin to the “we use 10% of our brain” belief.
It’s such a weird thing for Ken Ham to get upset about. It’s a silly quote said by JFK 53 years ago and it’s just waxing poetic about why we are drawn to the sea. “We come from the sea”. Fuck, Herman Melville said that eight years before the origin of species was published.
If Ken Ham is actually that upset by the quote, why get mad at the cruise line for using it. Get made at Kennedy, that nihilistic atheist ocean-worshiper, for saying the thing in the first place.
woozy:
I’m still mad at the Esoteric Order of Dagon for killing him.
The salinity of blood is 0.9%.
The salinity of the ocean varies but averages around 3.1 – 3.8%.
so to the nearest 10% it’s absolutely true!
====
So why didn’t Ham jump on the scientific inaccuracy of the saline of blood? Well, I suspect because he’d have to admit Kennedy was just talking poetical and didn’t literally mean anything.
“The sea calls to us; it’s in our blood.”
“No, it doesn’t, you fucking atheist. God calls to us and it’s the holy spirit in our blood and you’re doomed to hell if you don’t believe that literally.”
Souls of poets and minds open as vistas, these creationists have.
*sigh*. I drank too much with dinner.
rrhain @ # 38: The salinity of blood is 0.9%. The salinity of the ocean … averages around 3.1 – 3.8%.
But how much salinity did the oceans have ~375 MYA when our venerable ancestors went dry-curious?
Well, I thought it was an insincere, falsely polite ‘sorry’; the kind of thing that a teenage classmate would say as she announced you weren’t invited to her party because only the popular people were invited, and, well, ‘sorry’.